Reassessing self care under neoliberalism
We should be critically thinking about care politics in a pandemic.
Migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong on a rare extra holiday from work (Christmas Day 2020), respecting social distancing rules and celebrating safely with each other. Hong Kong as a city depends on domestic workers; there are nearly 22,000 in this city alone.
I began 2021 like many others, in calm and quiet, far away from bloated social gatherings. Mentally and emotionally exhausted, I felt a physical sensation of relief when I logged off work in December and I spent the holidays with a strange sensation of slowly returning back to life and mourning at the same time.
On Christmas Day, I saw the quantity of people running around Hong Kong trying to cling to some kind of a Christmas celebration despite the fourth wave of the pandemic here. I saw working-class sellers frantically unloading boxes and selling their wares to the anxious celebrators. And I sat down with Filipina domestic workers celebrating Christmas together on a rare holiday off from work, as usual, occupying public spaces in Hong Kong and sitting together (in small groups) with each other. I knew that many others didn’t have the day off; they would be at their employers’ homes, helping to prepare for dinner parties and guests. How we cling to celebrations and rituals and community to support us through these challenging times.
But I thought about the difference in the ideas of these communities and celebrations. Some were taking care not to participate in large gatherings, while others were not only organizing large events as if Christmas would never come again, but they were also subjecting their domestic workers to these situations and exposing them. In the face of disruption, which amongst us were caring for our communities and which were simply caring for themselves?
In contemporary feminist discourse, there is an emphasis on self care as being a feminist concept and practice because it is rooted in feminist principles of autonomy and choice. Self care humanizes feminists, who are often overburdened activists and workers balancing multiple identities and responsibilities. Often quoted, Audre Lorde famously wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Sharanya Sekaram writes for GenderIT, “Being able to practice self-care means having the autonomy to make your own decisions. It means moving away from what you are 'supposed' to do to what we need to do and how we make this decision for ourselves.”
What has become increasingly evident to me is that self care as a concept and response to this pandemic has been co-opted and entirely depends on privilege, access, and resources. What was initially posited as a political strategy for survival by Audre Lorde, particularly for Black feminists in the US, has been transformed by capitalism decades later in a deeply neoliberal world. Today, self care is a “remarkably flexible term that includes nearly any activity people use to calm, heal and preserve themselves in the face of adversity”.
During a global pandemic that has affected millions of people and killed hundreds of thousands, particularly the most vulnerable and marginalized in society, many are choosing to cope with adversity and practice self care by making selfish, irresponsible, and privileged choices. During the pandemic, some of those who have chosen self care as a means of dealing with the pandemic have put their needs above others - continuing to travel for vacation to poorer countries, frequent large parties, and in general, flout the restrictions that the COVID-19 pandemic has imposed as if they didn’t exist. It is clear how many people are responding to a collective, interdependent, and interconnected pandemic disease: they are retreating into individuality and making even more selfish decisions in their zero-sum world.
I am not sure if we can recover self care as a political project as we are equally doing with feminism by distinguishing feminist movements and activism from neoliberal feminism sold as a lifestyle. André Spicer writes about how self care was stripped of its politics: “What was supposed to be an invitation to collective survival becomes yet another form of individualism. This happens when self-care becomes nothing more than another word for “me time””.
There are enough feminist activists, thinkers, writers, and academics who continue to preserve and evolve diverse feminisms as a political, systemic, intersectional project that continues to transform individual lives, strengthen collective projects and movements, and influence broader activism. But I cannot say the same for self care as a feminist practice and concept.
If one’s self care adversely affects others or is predicated on the exploitation or oppression of others, then it isn’t self care as understood as a feminist project. It isn’t self care for self preservation in order to continue strengthening a feminist community and participate in a liberatory, collective project. And the bottom line issue with self care is that it might be inadequate as a concept in such dreary, late capitalist times. André Spicer writes, “If we spend all our time caring for ourselves, it is likely we will have no time and energy to challenge ourselves. This could easily leave us feeling safe and cared for but also stunted, while doing little to reduce the anxiety about the world around us.”
Self care is also inadequate as a practice. There were many moments in 2020 where I was on autopilot. I was unable to write for months (before I started this newsletter), felt disconnected from reality, and like I was losing my mind. We are still unable to process the grief from this past year. Encouraging people to reach even more within themselves when many are simply incapable of doing more, being more, makes me state with even more confidence that we need to be emphasizing community care this year. Self care won’t save us, but perhaps community care can. We need to continuously interrogate the limits of what we as individuals are capable of, and realize that we depend on others. This is one of the most ferociously dangerous things about neoliberalism: how seductively it convinces you that you can do it all, and also that only you can save yourself.
Community care can be a founding principle for a feminist mode of living, thinking, and being together. By linking our self care to community care, we can understand that we are not able to do everything, even for ourselves. By having more conversations about pathways forward that we are not sure about, we can count with diverse opinions from others in moments that lack moral clarity. In strengthening a community, we are practicing collective feminist politics. In thinking about collective issues and struggles, we are resisting neoliberalism.
Image credit: Wilfred Chan. One of the reasons why public health professionals in the West believed that masks were ineffective in preventing COVID-19 transmission is because they were only thinking about individual transmission. They failed to realize that masks are a form of community prevention and actually prevent others from getting sick, not only oneself.
Rejecting self care as a product of our neoliberal times doesn’t mean stopping there. The politics of care are complicated and intertwined; community care as a feminist project and concept hasn’t been historically straightforward either. First of all, care is gendered and racialized. We have expectations that care work be low paid, low status, accessible, and consistently provided work. Most care work is also just domestic and emotional labor done for free by women, which is still a subject of debate. I turn to African feminist thinker and writer Jessica Horn’s work on community care and how African feminists responded to the HIV pandemic (which did not receive nearly the same amount of concern or resources as the COVID-19 pandemic).
“Although it’s rarely acknowledged, one of the most compelling and radical models of activist care was developed by women in Africa amid the AIDS epidemic – one of the most devastating gendered crises facing the continent in the late 20th century. Amid social and economic upheaval, I saw how positive women organically came together in communities across the continent – forming their own support groups to face the immediate realities of living with an infection that bore the weight of no cure, as well as vicious social stigma that drove many to depression.”
I admire many of the examples of African feminist collective care practices that Jessica Horn mentions in this article, including structural organizational practices such as providing pyschosocial support for staff and feminist retreats for activists that are actually retreats, and not just work-filled conferences called retreats. Jessica Horn writes that these care models are “about solidarity along with individual reprieve”. Collective care necessarily makes space for individuals, whereas the opposite is not necessarily true with self care.
As we grow into another year of the COVID-19 pandemic that will continue to affect us very differently across economic, racial, gendered, and geographic lines, we need to look towards different ways of understanding our individuality and our collectivity. We need to look at how other social movements and activists have responded to traumatic events, and what tools we have at our disposal in order to care for each other. And we will need more feminist activism in 2021, centered around expanding communities and expanding care.
As Jessica writes, this was the legacy of feminist African activism that “built community, saved lives, chanted down stigma and, crucially, expanded our feminisms to understand that HIV and AIDS is a deeply feminist concern. While international and regional attention and its related funding shifts to engage other health crises, it remains vital for us as African advocates to persist in our solidarity with those living with and affected by HIV and AIDS as one of the enduring ‘intersections’ of our work towards justice, bodily autonomy and health rights for all.”
Ani Hao is a young feminist writer, journalist and media consultant. She reports on young feminist activism and youth-led social movements globally.
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This was such a timely read! I think now in a pandemic we're seriously grappling with the limits and possibilities of community care, when we're cut off from community in our routine ways (which has created space for other kinds of growth and healing but it hasn't been easy!) - so there's this interesting space to really question what self-care is/should be/has become. Definitely the problematic neoliberal cooptation of self-care as you discuss, and its sinister (???!!) impact of prioritizing the individual (who is almost always more privileged, whose well-being comes at the cost of others). It seems that your time with the communities of domestic workers in HK inspired you to think through some of this - would love to read more about such practices of care and resistance that are also going against the grain of state-sanctioned 'hygiene and self-protection' dictates